Stanley Cohen (sociologist) - Work

Work

A leading writer on Criminology and Sociology, Cohen is credited with coining the term moral panic in his 1972 study (Folk Devils and Moral Panics) of the popular UK media and social reaction to the Mods and Rockers phenomenon of the 1960s. This book is widely regarded by British criminologists as the most influential work in the field in the last forty years. The work applied the concepts of labelling, societal reaction and the Deviancy Amplification Spiral and helped in widening the scope of Criminology to include the sociology of crime and Social Control. Cohen suggests the media overreact to an aspect of behaviour which may be seen as a challenge to existing social norms. However, the media response and representation of that behaviour actually helps to define it, communicate it and portrays it as a model for outsiders to observe and adopt. So the moral panic by society represented in the media arguably fuels further socially unacceptable behaviour.

Read more about this topic:  Stanley Cohen (sociologist)

Famous quotes containing the word work:

    Evil gains work their punishment.
    Sophocles (497–406/5 B.C.)

    How marvellous it all is! Built not by saints and angels, but the work of men’s hands; cemented with men’s honest blood and with a world of tears, welded by the best brains of centuries past; not without the taint and reproach incidental to all human work, but constructed on the whole with pure and splendid purpose. Human, and yet not wholly human—for the most heedless and the most cynical must see the finger of the Divine.
    Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl Rosebery (1847–1929)

    And work was little in the house,
    She was free,
    Robert Frost (1874–1963)